backburner won't take changes to the model into account

[Dave Buckley]

When we can get backburner running submit job to client, load drawings xrefs etc, everything works fine, but if I change the model with whatever attachments to model, clients ignore change and look at the job that was originally submitted, been a problem in backburner for a while, think it's intermittant

[BrianKitts]

That's how backburner works, when you submit a job it packages the project as is. If you make changes you will need to resubmit the job.

 

Are you restarting a job in the manager after changes? When doing so I wouldn't expect the changes to take effect unless the changes are in an xref'd file, those changes might pick up. But changes to the main scene file will not update.

 

If you look in C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Backburner\Network\ServerJob you'll see a copy of the max file of the last backburner job that you ran. It runs the job off that copy, not the original file on your network.

[Nic H]

yep max zips up your scene and assets and send it away to backburner, so there is no way it would be able to update changes unfortunately.

[Dave Buckley]

sorry guys i've worded the original problem wrong.

 

when you say it won't be able to update changes, thats exactly what it IS doing, it appears to be searching the network location of the assets first to see if changes have been made, if it finds changes then it uses the network copies of the assets, if no changes have been made then it uses the local copies from the zip folder

[BrianKitts]

can you be more specific about what assets you are referring to?

 

textures don't get zipped into the archive. If you submit a job then change the texture on the network, the change will be visible when it renders. The only thing that gets zipped is the existing state of the parent scene at render. Any xrefs, textures, animation motion files, etc all get loaded at render time which mean they are going to get updated if they've been changed.

 

The only thing that won't update if is your main scene file. So if you send a file to backburner and it while it's sitting in the queue you open the file make some changes and save it over itself, those changes won't appear in the backburner render. However if while you where working you changed any of the network assets such as textures or proxies in that file, those are going to get updated when the job does launch (or gets restarted inside the bb monitor)

[Dave Buckley]

right ok that answers my question thank you brian

 

but . . . .

 

is there any way of avoiding this??? so that i can make local copies of my textures that are associated with the job??? lets say i have a teapot with a texture on it, i send that job to the farm.

 

while it is queing i alter the original texture and apply it to another teapot and send that to the queue.

 

i'm guessing that the only way i can get this to work as i want is to create duplicates of textures???

 

when you say that the textures don't get zipped, they seem to be present in the zip file???

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I have a asset library for keeping my textures, and then I have a project directory for the current project I am on. I keep a sub directory in the project directory called 'Project Assets.' This is where any texture that needs custom modified for a scene, or is project specific resides. This was I don't pollute my asset library with one-off textures that will never be used again.

 

If you had to make modifications to your teapot texture, they are best stored in this fashion. Then name them accordingly....

 

Teapot - Blue

Teapot - Chrome

Teapot - Dent

 

...Etc. Just make sure you keep things organized, and use a lehmen(sp?) naming system. 'Teapot - 254.tif' isn't going to mean much 3 months from now, but 'Teapot - Blue.tif' will.

Edited December 22, 2008 by Crazy Homeless Guy